1. Field of the Invention
The present invention provides a method and system for researching, procuring and issuing rights and permissions and generating licenses for third party copyrighted material which includes identifying and authenticating rights-holders, rights value coding, credit lines capture, and payment processing using a secure hosted digital gateway via a computer adapted to communicate via the internet with a computer.
2. Description of Related Art
Today's industry standard publishing practice for using third party copyrighted material within a new publication for print, online, digital, e-book, audio, video, or reprint, requires a manual, labor-intensive, time-consuming process. Such processing can take up to 12 weeks or more to complete, includes, inter alia: (a) project managing the permissions process; (b) researching for sources and authenticating rights-holders from various databases and registries; (c) manually constructing and formatting permissions request letters with understandable rights request language, specifications and conditions, and mailing, faxing or e-mailing to sources; and (d) constant follow-up to ensure receipt of request. Furthermore, today's practice typically requires that for each content item, a separate request for permission is processed manually, using labor-intensive methods with no systems for automating and/or bulk processing of all permissions required for a new work (i.e., book, article, DVD, CD-ROM, blog, newsletter and other publications in print, online or electronic format) which typically requires a separate permission request for each item of 3rd party content.
Once the receipt of the requests are verified, the process still requires: (e) clarifying permissions request language and requested rights language; (f) negotiating permissions language, usage rights, terms and fees; (g) manual or computer-assisted preparation of permission responses, licenses and invoices; (h) manual review of licenses for legal descriptions and usage rights in conformance with rights requested; (i) manual processing of license paperwork; and (j) manual interpretation of rights language and posting rights values and credit lines from the license(s) into a usage rights repository.
In addition, the following operations must also be conducted: general ledger coding and processing the invoice through accounts payable, payment processing and reporting permissions status and metrics to production.
With the rapid adoption of new reading and audio/video devices, like—e-books, e-readers, tablets, and streaming video players, publishers are seeking to reduce lead-times by getting permissions for 3rd party content faster, in order to get products to market faster.
It should be noted that there have been previous attempts to address these rights issues for digital products. For example U.S. Pat. No. 5,715,403, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated herein in its entirety by reference, discloses a system for attaching usage rights to a digital work, and particularly to a musical digital work. Similarly, an organization called Rightscom, Ltd developed a “Rights Expression Language” called MPEG-21, seeking to create a usage rights language for digital works. However, these interfaces fail to address the multitude of processing necessary to achieve a true end-to-end automated platform for requesting permissions, granting permissions and acquiring licenses.